‘What about Miss Crowe?’ said Will. ‘What can you tell us about her?’
‘Lilith Crowe?’ Mrs Speedicut looked startled. Her eyes darted towards the door, as if she feared someone might be listening outside. ‘She and her sisters strike the fear of God into them all,’ she said. ‘Gloag in the mortuary says they’re witches, all three. You’ve seen those three black birds that hang about outside the dissecting room windows? Crows, they are. Nasty, beady-eyed creatures.’
‘And?’ said Will.
‘And Gloag says that the three crows and the three women ain’t never seen at the same time.’
‘So?’
‘So, don’t you think it’s strange?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I think Gloag is strange if he considers such an occurrence worth remarking on.’
Mrs Speedicut shrugged. ‘I suppose it is a bit of a stretch,’ she said.
‘Women who don’t conform to men’s expectations have often been condemned as witches,’ I added. ‘But what else can you tell us? – Apart from the absurdity and superstition of the idiot Gloag?’
‘You have to admit, Mr Flockhart, it’s against nature to have a woman grubbing about in all that dead flesh.’
‘I admit nothing of the sort—’
‘The way those girls wander about the Hall at all hours too – it’s not right for a lady to have such licence in a place like that. Think about all those young medical men.’ Her face turned red and she lowered her voice. ‘That’s what I’ve heard about them.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘Speak plainly, woman. What, pray, have you heard about whom?’
Mrs Speedicut’s voice sank to a whisper. ‘I’ve heard that Lilith Crowe and her sisters can seduce any man they choose. I’ve heard all three of ’em roams the school at night taking body parts and bones, and that they says not a word to the medical men whose corpses they’ve plundered. It’s one o’ the reasons they moved here from St Bride’s, cause they were doin’ it there too. Not that anything has changed, for they say Dr Cruikshank won’t hear a word against any of them, no matter what.’ She leaned in close. ‘I’ve heard that Lilith Crowe’s a Siren, Mr Jem. A woman what’ll lure unwary men to their doom. I’ve heard that’s what they all are, and that they’ve ruined many a young man who came to Dr Crowe for his education and left with something he had never bargained on.’ She sat back. ‘No wonder they ain’t married,’ she said. ‘No wonder they never will be. And they’ve got worse since they came to Corvus. Much worse.’
I handed her the gin and baccy in silence.
At two o’clock in the morning I went through to wake Will. I found him already up. ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he said. ‘At least, I slept at first, but then I awoke with a foul taste in my mouth.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘It’s the dust, isn’t it? Bones and dried flesh. I could taste it in the air yesterday, feel it on my skin.’ He rubbed his face. ‘Corvus Hall has become a part of me already, and I a part of it.’
‘I can give you some lemon cordial to drink throughout the day. It will help to cleanse the system of impurities and freshen the palate.’ I shrugged. ‘I don’t know what else to offer.’
‘Did you sleep?’
‘Of course.’ I grinned. ‘Like the dead. I always do.’
In fact I had not slept at all. Instead, I had taken out the letter I had found in Will’s attic at the anatomy school and put it on my bedside table. My mother’s hand, addressed to a man who was not my father. Should I read it? It seemed a betrayal to do so. Whatever it might contain would surely be better left where it was, folded up in that small square of paper and completely forgotten about. To distract myself I had taken a look at the manuscript on poisons that I had worked on with Dr Bain. Should I continue with it? Should I use the work to gain my MD? I thought about my life as an apothecary, about the remedies I made for colds and coughs, for chilblains and sleeplessness, for menstrual cramps, boils, toothache, diarrhoea, indigestion . . . Oh, how bored I was by the mundanity of such trifling ailments.
After that I had thrown myself onto the bed, my eyes fixed upon my mother’s letter. When I got up at two, still fully clothed, I had picked it up and slipped it back into my pocket.
Downstairs Mrs Speedicut was asleep in front of the stove. Its embers glowed red in the darkness. I heard a mouse scamper across the floor. Beneath the workbench Gabriel was asleep on his truckle bed. Through the door of the herb drying room I could see a faint light. Jenny. She had left her candle burning again. How many times had I told her to put it out? She would burn the place down if she were not careful for the stuff in the herb drying room was tinder-dry. I pushed open the door. She was awake, lying in her nest of blankets amongst the hop sacks, reading a book on materia medica. It was huge and ancient, its leather spine cracked and flaking, the recipes written in a heavy gothic script. Dated 1597 on the title page, it had been in my family for generations. Gerard’s Herball. I had never used it, neither had my father, but Jenny was forever poring over it.
‘He has a mixture to make you sleep like the dead,’ she said. ‘Sleeping nightshade. It says here that “it provokes a dead sleepe wherein nothynge might awaken”. Can I try it?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘There’s another one in this other book I found that says the tail feathers of a raven should be burned and the ash blown into the eyes to remedy blindness. Can we try that too?’
I thought of Sorrow Crowe. I doubted she would allow Jenny to blow ashes into her eyes. I licked my fingers and pinched out Jenny’s candle. ‘Go to sleep,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back in a few hours.’
Will and I walked down to Corvus Hall in silence. The fog was gathering. I felt it cool and slimy against my cheek, tasted its familiar kiss of smoke and effluent on my lips. It was still little more than a veil, though I knew it would be impenetrable by the time the dawn came. I spat a gob of phlegm into the gutter and drew my scarf closer about my face and neck, pulling my hat down over my eyes and hunching my shoulders,
‘You look like a house breaker,’ said Will. ‘Did you bring an iron bar under your coat?’
I grinned. ‘I’m hoping that won’t be necessary. Unless you forgot the key?’
‘You think Allardyce murdered Halliday, don’t you?’ said Will. ‘And left his body, missing a right hand and a face, in the mortuary.’
‘It’s not impossible.’
‘But why desecrate the corpse?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s not impossible that Allardyce felt such retribution was fitting – this was the hand that plagiarised the essay, the hand that stole his work.’
‘But he seems such a timid fellow,’ insisted Will.
‘No doubt he is, for the most part,’ I said. ‘And yet how much might a man endure before he snaps? Dr Allardyce has been long overdue a promotion, if his own estimation of his abilities is anything to go by. And then, after years as demonstrator, he is upstaged by this arrogant young lad. He is taunted by Halliday for his diffidence, his dislike of the manly boisterousness that the others use to cope with the daily horrors of the dissecting room. Who knows what might drive a man to take matters into his own hands? Dr Crowe and Dr Cruikshank both prefer the young upstart Halliday, that much is quite evident. Perhaps Halliday styles himself after his mentor, Dr Cruikshank, cultivating a flamboyant style and a bonhomie with the students that poor earnest Allardyce, for all his abilities as a dissector, will never have.’
‘But we know nothing about Halliday. This is pure conjecture.’
‘It may well be conjecture, though I can tell you which of the two I would prefer to have standing over me with a knife in his hand.’
‘I think I would be hard-pressed to decide. The nervous older man or the young plagiarist whose credentials may be faked or stolen.’
It was a fair point. ‘It is interesting that Dr Allardyce’s hands are steady as a rock when faced with a cadaver,’ I said. ‘He is drawn to seek the answers to the mysteries of life in the flesh and bones of the dead. He searches
the body for answers, but only once it is without life, only when it is not about to rise up and mock him, criticise him, question him. A live body fills him with fear. Did you mark how his hands shook when he talked about surgery?’
I sighed. I wished I could find the same confidence and pleasure as Dr Allardyce did when poring over a corpse. For all that I was about to do it myself, it was never a job that I relished.
The Hall stood some thirty paces back from the road. The laurel hedge had grown huge and unkempt while the place was unoccupied. It had still not been trimmed, so the building itself was largely hidden from view. It had a silent brooding air, its streaky stucco ghostly in the dark. For once I would have preferred a blanket of the thickest fog so that our entry might be concealed from the night watch, should they pass down St Saviour’s Street. There was no sign of life at the Hall, no light in any of the windows, no lantern glow or wavering candle flame. I presumed there was no night porter. If there was he was evidently either asleep, or deep inside the building.
We crept across the front lawn. ‘Are you sure, Jem, really sure about this?’ said Will when we reached the door. His eyes were wide and dark, his pupils dilated. He did not relish our night-time adventure, I knew that much, but he would come with me no matter what I asked of him. I nodded, and he slipped the key into the lock.
Inside, it was as dark as the grave. The fanlight over the door had been painted over, I had no idea why, but it meant that not even a glimmer of gaslight from the street could creep in. We waited for a moment, but there was no sign of anyone, and so I lit the lantern I had brought. Its narrow beam of light sliced through the dark like a golden knife. Will followed me across the hall and down the passage towards the dissecting room and the dead house. The stink of the place seemed to have grown in tandem with the gloom, as if the dead took over the moment the living had departed, and I saw him put his hand over his mouth as if to suppress a retch.
‘Breathe through your mouth,’ I cautioned. ‘You’ll look like a dolt, I admit, but it’s a small price to pay.’
All the bodies were back in the dead house, but the sight of the tables and the stools, the microscopes and knives laid out on the benches, the stains upon the floor made my scalp prickle. The curling pictures on the walls displaying the circulation, the lymphatics, the skeleton, the nervous system, had a dry vellum-like look to them, as if they had been etched onto sheets of dead skin. The beam of my lamp reflected back at me in the eyes of a pair of rats that skirted the wall beneath the sluice. The desire to turn back was almost overpowering. I took Will’s hand, glad of the warmth of his fingers.
As we crept down the passage to the dead room the smell grew thicker, the darkness deeper. I held up my lamp as Will pushed the door open. Before us, bodies were laid out side by side beneath sheets stained with blood and fluid, with alcohol, resin and wax.
‘Which one did you want to look at?’ said Will, aghast. He hauled a handkerchief from his pocket and plunged his face into it. ‘There are so many!’
He was right, for in addition to those that had been returned at the day’s end, half-butchered from the dissecting rooms, more had come in since I had been there earlier. ‘Find it, then!’ His voice was a hiss. ‘Do whatever it is you wanted to do. But hurry. Hurry!’
I went from corpse to corpse, lifting one sheet after another. Some were untouched, their faces grey-white, glimmering like lard in the light of the lantern. Others were partly anatomised, chest cavities open, stomachs eviscerated, arms or legs skinned, though none, I noticed, had been started on the face.
I found it at last, against the far wall. The hand, severed, lay where Dr Cruikshank had tossed it, the face – my God! What a face it was! Without flesh to give it familiarity there was only horror. I closed my eyes. Something Dr Cruikshank had said echoed in my head: I had some of the lads spruce the place up a little. The useless ones – Tanhauser, Wilson, Squires . . . the lime wash does something to mask the smell. It was the hand, the hand that I wanted. I had carried it around all day, but it was the hand that would tell me who the body belonged to. Why had I not realised it sooner? I pulled a leather roll of surgical knives from my satchel, sat my lantern down beside the faceless corpse, and bent to my task.
I had not been at work for long before I heard a noise. It came from behind us, from the dissecting room. What was it? The scuffling of a rat? I listened again, my ears straining in the silence. And then I heard it. A creak – the opening of a door – and then footsteps, tiptoeing, but coming closer. I pulled the dark lantern half closed.
‘Shh!’ My lips were against Will’s ear. ‘Someone is coming. We cannot get out. Not now. Not without being seen. We must hide.’
‘Hide?’ hissed Will. ‘Hide where? We are in a mortuary!’
The footsteps were closer now. Was it the night porter? I did not recognise the heavy tread of a man, could not hear the sigh and grunt of someone tramping through their rounds. I heard the door to the anatomy room being slowly drawn open. There was little time. A wavering light filtered beneath the mortuary door as a lantern was held high, the footsteps – measured, quiet, but assured of where they were headed – drew nearer.
I lifted a sheet, the body beneath as pale as a flounder. ‘Get on.’
‘I’m not—’
‘You must, Will. We cannot be found here—’ I shoved the corpse over a little. ‘There’s plenty of room. It’s just an old man. Now get up!’
For a moment I thought Will was about to refuse, was about to say that he had had enough, that he did not care who was coming, that he would happily throw in his new commission just to be away from the place. ‘We must find out what is going on here,’ I whispered. ‘For something is going on, Will. Something wicked. Murder, perhaps worse—’
‘For you, Jem,’ he hissed. ‘I would do this only for you.’ He stretched out beside the naked old man, and I flapped the winding sheet back down over both of them. Will’s feet protruded, for he was a good four inches taller than his new bedfellow. I hoped that whoever was about to enter would not notice that two of the residents were still wearing their boots. I lifted the sheet that covered the next corpse. The skin seemed to glow greenish in the dark. I glimpsed straggling hair, eyes open and milky, lips sagging over broken teeth. It was the cadaver Wilson had been working on, ‘past its best’ and partly anatomised. And yet what choice did I have? I slammed the dark lantern closed and slid in beside her.
Beneath my hand I could feel the clammy skin of her withered thigh. Something damp began seeping into my sleeve. I wanted more than anything to scream, to leap up and run – instead I turned my head and peeped out from beneath the winding sheet as the door eased open.
I could not see who it was, not properly, for his back was to us, the lantern he had brought with him on the workbench against the wall. It threw his figure into silhouette, and made his shadow loom tall and crooked. There was something familiar about him, but I could not say what it was. I heard a sigh, and then the rattle of knives. They were surgeon’s knives, I could tell by the shape, the glint of the steel blades in the lantern light. A gloved hand set them out side by side: the long thin boning knife, the saw, the strong, sharp Liston knife. And then all at once I saw him stiffen. Had he heard us? I was holding my breath, but perhaps he had heard my heart, for it was pounding fit to wake my dead companion. And then he turned.
His was the face I had seen at the window as we left the Hall to go to Sorley’s. I had only glimpsed it then, but there was no mistaking it now, for its features – eyes, nose, mouth – were all but obliterated by what must have been one of the worst cases of confluent smallpox I had ever seen. The scarring was a whorled textured mass, the eyes almost lost to it, the nose eroded, the lips cratered and twisted. The hand that held the Liston knife was gloved, but I knew that beneath it the flesh would be as scarred as his face, the pustules melting the skin like boiling sugar. The pain of it must have almost turned his mind, and for all that I was horrified, I felt a terrible lurch of pity. Kn
ife in hand, the man stepped towards the shrouded corpse beside which Will lay hidden. There was nothing for it but to shout out, to warn him – but it was clear that Will had seen the man too, for all at once he cried out and reared up from his place beside the workhouse corpse.
The man let out a screech of terror and reeled back, his knife clattering to the floor. I too flung back my winding sheet and leaped up. With a high-pitched scream, the man seized his lantern and vanished out of the door.
‘After him!’ I cried, bounding out of the mortuary. Ahead of me, the man’s lantern vanished from sight. I heard the sound of footsteps running, of doors slamming, and then all was quiet. Left once more in the dark in the passage and unsure of my surroundings, I fumbled my way back.
‘Why didn’t you come? I could see nothing without a lantern. Did you not want to find out who he was, what he was doing here?’
‘Poor fellow,’ said Will. ‘He must have thought the final trumpet had sounded and the dead were rising from their graves.’
I grinned. ‘Lord knows what he will say about it tomorrow.’
‘Well, in case there is actually a night porter here, we should probably leave.’ He sounded cross. I saw him wrinkle his nose as he raised the lantern. ‘What’s that slimy stuff on your coat, Jem?’
‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘I’m trying not to think about it. Preservatives, I hope. But let’s take these.’ I picked up the Liston knife that the man had been holding, and which had clattered to the floor when he dropped it in terror. I returned it to the box of surgical knives he had left behind. Inlaid in silver in the centre of the lid two initials glittered: S. S. ‘Well, well,’ I said. ‘I believe we have just met Silas Strangeway.’
‘I thought he was about to eviscerate me.’
‘Perhaps he was.’ I looked at the feet of the corpse beside which Will had been lying. A label of brown card was tied with string about the big toe. It contained a single word STRANGEWAY, and the day’s date. ‘It seems I had inadvertently put you beside Dr Strangeway’s corpse.’
Surgeons’ Hall Page 10